A1200 crashes (overheated Alice?)

[Nikolaj_sofus]

I reacently opened a thread asking advice regarding CF as harddrive.

I now figured that it would not be the CF which courses the problem.
I also removed my 030 accelerator to make sure that it was not the course of the fault.

My problem is that the amiga starts getting unstabile after about 1-3 hours uptime (varies upon usage).
Some times it reboots with a software failure message other time the system freezez.
In some games artifacting starts to show till an extend where the game becomes unplayable.

When the system first crashes, it will continue being highly unstabil untill the system has been off power for some time.

I tried opening the case and feel the various chips and noticed that the alice were segnificantly warmer then the other chips. Almost so hot that you could burn yourself on it.

My prime suspect of the system failures is now that the Alice chip overheats.
Is this a known problem and in that case, does it correspond with the problems that i experience?

In that case, would adding a heatsink to the chip stabilize my system?

Hope there are some people out there who can help, i've been fighting with this for quite some time now

[cosmicfrog]

thermal expansion, check for dry joints

as a rule of thumb if a chip is to hot to hold your finger on it for longer than say 5-6 seconds then its to hot

amigas never came with active cooling or heatsinks, where are you running your machine ? in a warm room on a radiator ? well probably not a radiator

[rkauer]

I put heatsinks on mine A1200. Alice and Lisa chips use to heat a lot.

But most common cause for the heat issue is bad filter capacitors near the affected chip. Or undervoltage.

[Nikolaj_sofus]

are those capacitors pretty standard and easily found in the local elektronics store or rather rare?
Can you give some sort of info on which pins carry the supply, so i can measure the voltage?

Im running it in a rather temperate room, maybe a bit on the hot side maybe, but i guess not more then 22-24 degrees
The machine is standing on the floor as it is now.

[rkauer]

The original ones are SMD units, but can be replaced by standard units.

Look into "Let's change those capacitors" thread for the complete list and a visual guide.

[marty]

Originally Posted by Nikolaj_sofus

are those capacitors pretty standard and easily found in the local elektronics store or rather rare?
Can you give some sort of info on which pins carry the supply, so i can measure the voltage?

Im running it in a rather temperate room, maybe a bit on the hot side maybe, but i guess not more then 22-24 degrees
The machine is standing on the floor as it is now.

Brinck Elektronik har det du skal bruge

http://www.brinck.dk/

[Nikolaj_sofus]

Originally Posted by marty

Brinck Elektronik har det du skal bruge

http://www.brinck.dk/

Oki... then it's good that i live close to them
But was a bit disapointed that they did not have any heatsinks.
Called them yesterday but without luck.
Had to order som VGA memory coolers from cooler kit instead.
Think i will try the heatsink approach before i start soldering on my MB

[kixs]

My A1200 is overheating too. It takes around 30-45min of game playing to start developing some artifacts on the screen. It takes a bit longer to crash the game. I opened the case and played like that for hours without any problems. Alice gets really hot. Other chips only lightly warm to the touch. But when the case is closed the underside of the case gets hot, not only under Alice chip but like half of the motherboard - heat spreads unbelievably. Because only Alice gets really hot, I'll put one heat sink on it - will have to customize it with a pile to fit in.

[Nikolaj_sofus]

Originally Posted by kixs

My A1200 is overheating too. It takes around 30-45min of game playing to start developing some artifacts on the screen. It takes a bit longer to crash the game. I opened the case and played like that for hours without any problems. Alice gets really hot. Other chips only lightly warm to the touch. But when the case is closed the underside of the case gets hot, not only under Alice chip but like half of the motherboard - heat spreads unbelievably. Because only Alice gets really hot, I'll put one heat sink on it - will have to customize it with a pile to fit in.

I bought some selfsticking copper vga ram heatsinks and put four of them on the alice chip (right about covers it)

haven't done much testing yet, but i had it up running for about 2-3 hours now without problems.

The heatsinks does actually get pretty warm.

The good thing about the vga ram heatsinks, is that they are only 5 mm high, so no need of modification.